Flowers, food, and everyday life

Archive for May, 2013

Surely everyone loves pansies. We love the old-fashioned pansies with faces, although the new hybrid faceless colors get more beautiful every year. I love the dark purple and yellow ones but I usually wait until the late autumn and buy whatever’s on sale. If you plant them in the late fall, they give you autumn color and typically live through the winter here in Eastern Kentucky, flowering very early in the spring. My pansies are typically the first bloomers in the spring, beating even crocus and snow drops.

The closer it gets to Thanksgiving, the more anxious retailers are to trash everything except Christmas plants and decorations. I’ve gotten an entire flat of pansies from Lowe’s for 50¢. Heck if only half the plants survive to bloom in the spring, it’s still a great bargain. When February staggers around, those pansies are the most beautiful sight in my yard. I took the pics a couple of months ago; they were throw-away bargains too. Worth scouting out this fall.

AG Eric Holder testified under oath to Congress that he had no part or knowledge of any media surveillance. Now we know he signed the warrant to convince the judge to place James Rosen and William LaJeunesse plus their producer under surveillance. Did Holder lie to Congress then?

In its version of a defense, the DOJ attempts to downplay the warrant and surveillance by saying they never intended to prosecute Rosen or the others. Whoa! The warrant claims the DOJ considered Rosen a co-conspirator, i.e., a criminal and feared he was a flight risk. Did DOJ/Holder lie to the judge then?

Charles Krauthammer sums up the double jeopardy situation for Holder here; keep in mind that Nixon’s AG John Mitchellwent to prison for lying to Congress. I watched those hearings and I recall that the public and the MSM considered the lying to be a very big deal, an attitude of lawlessness from an out-of-control administration.

I’m certainly not the only one who sees the resemblance; some of us recall the Daley Machine back a couple of generations, which may have cheated VP Richard M Nixon out of the 1960 presidency against John F Kennedy. The corruption of the Chicago Way is legendary. Michelle Obama grew up in that machine, courtesy of her father, who worked for the city utilities and was a sergeant in his political precint, meaning he was responsible for keeping his people in line and making sure they voted for the Dem machine candidate. Michelle was later recruited by Valerie Jarrett to work in Mayor Daley’s office. Barack Obama was nurtured, promoted, and sponsored by the Daley Chicago Machine. Many of us who were Hillary or Edwards supporters in 2008 snickered that Obama claimed he would ‘clean up DC corruption’ when he was a product of the most corrupt political entity in the US. http://nationalreview.com/article/349610/obamas-chicago-way-john-fund Fund gives an excellent summary.

I wasn’t a supporter of Michele Bachman’s presidential ambition but she has numerous assets, both personal and professional. Unfortunately for her, she’s an accomplished and intelligent conservative woman. Oh dear, the feminist MSM can’t allow that. It’s not important whether you agree with the politics of Sarah Palin or Michele Bachman, what’s important is that each has every right to advance her beliefs to the public, who can freely choose to accept or reject them. She deserved the same opportunities as any liberal politician. Why doesn’t the MSM label DWS or Sheila Jackson Lee or Patty Murray or Jackie Speier or Maxine Waters or Barbara Boxer as goofy or fringe? These ‘feminists’ have made enough wild and stupid comments to fill a book. If you consider a conservative or libertarian politician stupid or extreme, I can guarantee the MSM has previously mocked that conservatives or libertarian as stupid or extreme.

Do Obama and the Dems recruit so many young people because they’re apt to be naïve about political norms or for their passion or their hope to make them lifelong Dems or all of the above? Here a conservative Repub pretends to University of Colorado at Boulder students that he is sending a thank you card to the IRS for [illegally] targeting conservatives and religious groups to President Obama. The students are overwhelmingly liberal – it’s Boulder after all – but how dumb do you have to be to not know that’s illegal and wonder how it would be if a GOP president/administration targeted liberal groups? Yeesh. http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4770

Finally here’s a comment I got from an Obama supporter, typical of the emails/comments I get from Obama supporters. I didn’t approve or respond to it, since it’s simply a hateful rant without any attempt at dialogue or debate. I didn’t mention race at all in my post that elicited this comment but you’ll notice that’s the vehement charge of this person, who not only needs some manners and critical thinking skills but some knowledge of Freedom of the Press. Nothing like waltzing into a strange blog and dropping a big load of hateful crap, I guess.

Jesus, you are a disgsuting racist a-hole! Barack Obama is not a Dictator

It’s not the Chigaco way, It’s the Racist Right way!

Hitler orchestrated the deaths of 6 million European Jews and millions of others in his evil ambition to cleanse his country of those he deemed impure. Obama did not. How sick are you?

Man, I was right! Anyone who hates barack obama IS a racist, bigoted scumbag!

Freedom of the Press is about freedom to print and disseminate information and ideas. It is not freedom to hide and conceal sources. The government has every right to pursue the source of the leaks. Reporters have no more right to hide information than the public. This is not an assault on the “First Amendment”.

No one is trying to take away our guns, the bill that was defeated in the senate was about background checks for gun buyers. There was a clause in the bill that Obama insisted on that would have made it illegal to use the checks to start a list of gun owners.

None of the crude is being exported. All of it is being refined in the U.S. Some of the refined product will be exported but at good profit – something that will improve our trade balance and strengthen the dollar. Yet another iteration of another failed House ‘product’. Yet more waste of the taxpayers time by the right wing. GOP and RNC : selling an inferior product at inflated prices to a dwindling market. While he tried to promote an agenda to help America the Republican Congress did their best to destroy the middle class and poor.

Like most people with a little common sense, Michael Ramirez isn’t terribly impressed with President Obama’s decision to allow DOJ head Eric Holder to investigate DOJ head Eric Holder on the myriad scandals continuing to emerge. Here’s his cartoon from http://www.nationalreview.com

As far as the IRS corruption scandal goes, John Fund at National Review suggests a Special Counsel investigation rather than a Independent Prosecutor. You’ll recall Ken Starr was an Independent Prosecutor in the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal while Patrick Fitzpatrick was Federal Counsel in the Valerie Plame case – darlings of the liberal media and highly overdone. Fund thinks a Special Counsel would be subject to less interference from the administration and would allow as least some hearings by Congress to continue.